Quotes from Theodor W. Adorno

To say 'we' and mean 'I' is one of the most recondite insults.

Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.

The first and only principle of sexual ethics: the accuser is always in the wrong.

The gods look in pleasure on penitent sinners.

Anti-Semitism is the rumour about the Jews.

The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass available.

There is no right life in the wrong one.

Dissonance is the truth about harmony.

He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private interest. While he gropingly forms his own life in the frail image of a true existence, he should never forget its frailty, nor how little the image is a substitute for true life. Against such awareness, however, pulls the momentum of the bourgeois within him.

To those who no longer have a homeland, writing becomes home

freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.

Triviality is evil - triviality, that is, in the form of consciousness and mind that adapts itself to the world as it is, that obeys the principle of inertia. And this principle of inertia truly is what is radically evil.

Art respects the masses, by confronting them as that which they could be, rather than conforming to them in their degraded state.

Only thought which does violence to itself is hard enough to shatter myth.

It would be advisable to think of progress in the crudest, most basic terms: that no one should go hungry anymore, that there should be no more torture, no more Auschwitz. Only then will the idea of progress be free from lies.

What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline.

One must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly.

The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.

Laughing in the cultural industry is mockery of happiness.

Very evil people cannot really be imagined dying.

Because thought has by now been perverted into the solving of assigned problems, even what is not assigned is processed like a problem.

The element of truth in the concept of genius is to be sought in the object, in what is open, not confined by repetition.

The individual mirrors in his individuation the preordained social laws of exploitation, however mediated.

Intelligence is a moral category.